All seven hells
by emmiemac
Summary: A young woman reflects on her short life and brief marriage to a well-known knight of Westeros. One shot. Violence.


_DISCLAIMER: This story is entirely based on character[s] from George R.R. Martin's _A Song of Ice and Fire

All seven hells

The bleeding would not stop. It usually took a long time but it had always stopped eventually. But this time it would not. She sobbed and breathed raggedly, as she always did: frightened by so much blood, and terrified that he would come back. Sometimes he did that, as though all his efforts at getting her with child had not been enough. But they hadn't been. They had been wed nearly two years now, and still she had still not given him an heir. She was useless. That's what he told her: weak and useless. He sometimes looked as though he would kill her; she sometimes wished he would.

She had dreamed of being wed to a knight like so many other girls. She had learned the songs and admired their solemn vows and brave deeds: they were the best of men. When her father told her she would marry a landed knight with his own keep and lands, she had been thrilled. It was a great match for a third daughter of a minor house, though the man's family had only been raised as recently as his grandfather. He was a renowned warrior, he father told her, knighted at only sixteen, and so she would be protected. He had not thought she would need protection from him.

She had felt her first apprehension in the sept when she first saw him. He was enormous, dark and looming, and did not smile, not even with his eyes. She felt her own smile falter but pressed on: this is what her father wanted and what she thought she had wanted. She would make a good wife, she knew she would: she was dutiful and obedient and kind and hoped for many children. Even at the feast he said little, though he looked her over appraisingly. It made her feel very small, which she was, at least compared to him. She began to wonder how he would treat her at their bedding. Her friends were giggling when they began undressing him but feel silent when he did not joke with them; his own men stripped her hastily, like a task equal to brushing down a horse, and left with hard smirks on their faces. Even now she cringed to remember those hours, the pain and his brutal indifference to her. He pushed her down forcefully, as though he did not know his own strength, and put all of his heavy, hard weight on her so that she could barely breathe. She whimpered as his big hands fumbled at her body, then pushed open and held her knees apart until she felt she might snap like a chicken's wishbone. She was not prepared for the enormity of the pain that tore through her, so that she screamed and he clamped one of his huge hands over her face, making her bite her own lip until it bled. That is what she remembered of her wedding night: pain and blood and fear for her own life. The next morning she was bruised and weak and had to have milk of the poppy. She knew bedding could be painful for a maiden, she hoped it would get better but instead it got worse. Tenderness was unknown to him; his only laughter, when she did hear it, was directed at her, though never so much as his rage.

The keep was silent and grim as everyone whispered and tip-toed around their Ser. She was treated respectfully but not warmly, and they would stop their whispering whenever she entered a room so that she felt like and intruder in her husband's home. He had no family, only a younger brother who never visited or sent any word and was never spoken of in front of the master of the keep. He had only an army of silent servants and his own rough men; she had her own ladies though in time they too learned to go about their tasks as silently as Silent Sisters, afraid of angering him. Everything angered him.

He wanted a son and would brook no impediments or delays. The first time she got her moon's blood, he struck her so hard that she fell to the ground, her head spinning and her ears ringing. It became his habit, so that she prayed for children not so that she could love and raise them, but instead hoping to stem his anger and violence.

Sometimes she could not leave her bed and her ladies would need to attend her there. Once she heard the youngest, prettiest one screaming shortly after leaving her chamber and she knew he was having the girl against her will; for what woman would give herself to such a cold brute. She never saw the girl again and prayed that she had fled; hopefully back to her family to tell them of the truth of the man. Sometimes she heard girls scream and beg mercy. At first she wanted to help and protect them; then she was just relieved it was not her, not again. She no longer walked the halls, managing her household, nor did the castellan come to her anymore. Within time she lost all her ladies save for an old woman who had served her husband's father and grandfather. She saw no one but the old woman, whose name she had forgotten. She forgot a great deal, and fumbled at the simplest tasks and even abandoned her needlework. She barely spoke. She tried to remember her family, but her mind was unclear, and seemed so very long ago; she sometimes dreamed of running with other girls who looked like her and thought they were her sisters. They even rode out, with the sun shining on their faces and the wind blowing in the trees making a wonderful rushing sound through the leaves. They raced each other home, laughing all the way until she woke in silent darkness. Now memories, laughter, contentment, even hope were gone.

She never asked for a looking glass anymore after she had bathed. She could feel her nose was swollen and had a bump; it often bled if she sneezed. One of her ears was oversized and misshapen: she could feel all the bumps and the hardness and she could no longer hear from it. Her jaw was also crooked now, and she could barely open it to speak without pain. She no longer tongued her missing teeth; they were just gone. The old woman who helped to bathe and dress her looked at her stonily, never registering the shock of her once-pretty face gone to ruin as other servants had once done when they still came to her chamber. She saw the brittle long hair fall out as it was brushed: once bright gold, now dull and lifeless. She walked slowly and painfully, her sides and joints aching like and old woman. She saw her ribs sticking out, and the bruises that hadn't healed. None of this she wanted to see in a mirror all at once, in case she did not recognize who she would see. If she thought really hard, she could remember that she was seven-and-ten.

But she _had_ quickened despite everything, she was sure of it. He had left for almost two turns of the moon, gone to a tourney somewhere, and she had not bled. But she had not told him, she had not had the chance: he had come into her chamber on his return, angrily demanding to know if she would finally breed, and pushed her down and covered her mouth when she tried to speak to him, causing her already painful jaw and ear to suffer more. She wondered if he would have understood what she was trying to tell him, her words hardly made sense anymore. Stupid, he called her; they married me to a barren idiot. He never acknowledged or even realized that his beatings had left her so incapable. He had ravaged her with the same hard fury as he rode his great destrier, crushing her and tearing her apart once more. And now she was bleeding again, soaking through her torn dress and smallclothes and the bed covers, and it would not stop, and so she realized she would never have children. She would never have anything again.

She closed her eyes and drew another painful, quivering breath.

Then she heard him come in and turned to look at him glowering over her, dark and brutish and angry, always so very angry. She stared back with eyes full of weak loathing instead of fear.

"I…had quickened," she managed to say awkwardly but almost clearly though her jaw barely moved. "You've killed it…and me."

"Die then," he told her in his rumbling growl, "and go to hell."

"You...are…h-hell, Gre-gor: all…s-sev-seven."

He bent over her, large and threatening, and took a pillow from her bed. His eyes were dark and depthless, like looking into an empty pit.

"In less than a fortnight, ravens will come…offering me a new wife, not a useless barren failure, an idiot." He looked at her with cold contempt.

"Gods…help her," she whispered; and she closed her eyes and almost smiled as he brought the pillow down over her face.


End file.
